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It’s been a few days since I last posted mainly because I’ve been feeling absolutely shit and hiding away from the world again. Just me and the voices cut off and locked away in our own little world.

I was supposed to have an appointment with my support worker from Rape Crisis yesterday but I didn’t go. I don’t know why, my head was feeling too messed up and I spent most of the afternoon and evening yesterday cutting random words into my skin (more like scratches – no medical attention needed). Anyway, I regret not going now because I then remembered that she isn’t in the office for the rest of this week and now I won’t be able to see her until next week sometime, and I do actually find the appointments with her help, even though some of the stuff that comes out of my mouth in that room are pretty fucked up at times.

Today I had an appointment with new CPN. I’ve moaned about her a bit in recent posts but today she allowed me to talk about some of the bad things rather than making me only talk about good things. She asked me what the best thing was that has happened in the past week and I told her that I got my final semester one essay result today and passed the module with an overall 68% which isn’t too bad considering my concentration was absolutely fucked whilst I was trying to study for and write it. Now that the tutor’s have marked it, it gets sent to the Exam Board for them to confirm the mark. I’m kind of hoping they might find another 2% to award me as I believe anything above 70% is an A and that would of course be nice.

She asked me loads of questions about the module I’ve just finished and I wasn’t sure whether she was just trying to engage me in conversation or if she was trying to use up as much time as possible talking about the “positives” so that there wasn’t much time left when she finally asked what hadn’t been so good over the last week. I told her about going to see lovely GP last Wednesday and about my medication being increased. I told her about the fear and sadness I felt at hearing the mocking voice that makes all the derogatory comments becoming more male in tone and this scaring me that I wasn’t in control of that voice, not in the way I can deal with the giggle.

I told her that I’d become pretty upset last night, I was angry and emotional and tried to talk to the male voice, to ask what he wanted from me, to ask him to stop it. She said I have to try and laugh at it, disagree with it, ignore it, drown it out with loud music in my headphones… but… not talk to it as I was showing it respect that way and encouraging it to speak to me… in turn distressing me even more.

When our hour was over and I left the appointment I felt a bit mixed up. On the one hand I didn’t feel quite so deflated as I felt after last week’s one. I felt she listened a bit more this week, but I still felt like I left the appointment with lots of crap swimming round my head and then actually wished I was still there in the appointment so that I had the opportunity to just get it all out. But by this point I was almost home and I came back feeling angry with myself that we had wasted about half an hour talking about my university course and that half an hour I could have used to tell her about my head crazies. But the thing is that when you’re actually in the room with her she very much leads the conversation and I don’t know why, but I find it very very hard to try and change the topic of conversation over to something that I actually need to talk about.

So on my way home I went into the chemist and picked up my weekly prescription, and when I got home and was putting all the little boxes in the cupboard I suddenly had a passing thought that I could just to swallow the lot of it. But I knew I didn’t want to overdose, I didn’t want the consequences of it, so I put the medications safely in the cupboard… And then I cried. A lot. I felt really confused over what I wanted, about the voices I’m hearing, about the massive intense self harm urges, about whether I was capable of carrying on with my university course even though it is only part time and from home I just didn’t have the belief in myself that I could do it and then began to doubt if I even wanted to keep on doing it. Stupid eh when I know I passed my essay with a semi decent grade.

I haven’t even told anyone that I passed. I haven’t phoned or text my Mum or best friend. I’ve known for two days now that I passed and yet my CPN is the only one who knows. Why? Because to tell my Mum or to tell best friend or to write it as a facebook status means people will all say “congrats” or “well done” and I don’t want to see messages saying I’ve done well at something!! And if I tell them then they will expect me to be all happy and smiling and I feel like I’m all out of fake smiles for the moment. I’ll tell them when I find the strength to smile (if only temporarily) again.

So that’s been my last few days. Nothing very exciting. No more appointments until next week and still a week to go before I start modules 2 & 3 for semester two of the course. My Mum is off work this week and has text me a couple of times to ask if I’d like to meet up and do something but I just don’t really want to see anyone, not even family at the moment :(

Anyway. Time to go and try to find something to do with myself for the next few hours before bed. I might try and have a shower, it’s been a good few days since I last had one. Showers tend to feel pretty pointless… when you’re already feeling like a ‘dirty’ person yet you get in one because someone has said in a cheery voice that it’ll “make you feel better” but, in reality, you know that no matter how much you scrub and wash, you aren’t ever going to feel any cleaner or any less dirty.

My head feels very noisy tonight and to be honest I just want a break from it, just a little bit of peace for a while, please.

I found this video on youtube after seeing some other bloggers post it and it’s scarily real. Like really scarily real. Scarily real to the point I’d tell you if you’re feeling like you could be triggered I’d say don’t watch/listen to it. If you are feeling OK or curious about what it’s like to hear voices it’s very realistic, well I think so anyway. Around the 2 minute to 2 and a half minutes mark is closest to my experiences of voice hearing (without the deep breaths) however that weird sound that I can’t describe in the last 10 or 20 seconds, that is scarily like what I mean when I write that my head is “noisy”.

They say use headphones to hear it properly but I turned my laptop up full and that was real enough for me. It’s very realistic though and I think anyone who is interested in what it’s like to be hearing voices or in psychosis should have a nosey.

Oh my God. Why can’t I sleep? I’ve been lying in bed for three hours just tossing and turning until I finally got fed up and came back through to watch TV. There is nothing on the TV at this time of night/morning, it’s all repeats of things I’ve seen before. I don’t know if I’m worrying about seeing this guy tomorrow, I guess I won’t be fully relieved until I’ve handed over his money and deleted his phone number.

But I’m sure it’s not the guy or the money keeping me awake, I’m sure it’s a baby. Every time I go to nod off I hear crying, that little but strong cry of a newborn. But there is no baby, no matter where I look. I hear it and follow it’s cry but then it just disappears. It’s my crazy mind playing tricks with me, cruel tricks at that.

One of the worst feelings is not knowing for definite what’s real and what’s fake. I hear and see things that I’m sure other people can’t. If they could hear and see what I see and hear then they would walk about looking like confused zombies most of the time. That’s how I feel as though I look anyway.

My arm really hurts, it’s covered in bruises as well as a cut that I probably should have gone to A&E about, but I couldn’t face it. It’s not massive, it will just be yet another scar. I’m watching a program right now about holidays, I so wish I didn’t have agoraphobia I’d love to be lying on a nice hot beach just now, dipping myself in the water every so often and have enough concentration to read a book on a sun lounger. The last time I went abroad I think I was 22 or 23 and that was just for a city break. So it’s been about 7 years anyway.

Oh I’m rambling here. I’m just trying to see if typing in the dark will make me any more sleepy but apparently not, I think it’s time to find the most boring book that I own and see if that sends me into a world of zzz’s.

It would seem that taking my full prescribed dose of diazepam by 5pm yesterday meant that I had an utter nightmare in trying to get some sleep. I think it was around 1am that I dozed off, so four hours of sleep isn’t good. I’ve just taken a couple more diazepam to see if I’m still sleepy enough for them to work (just another few hours I beg!!)

I am up to 300mg a day of Amisulpride now. Still a baby dose I know, it was supposed to be being increased around about now to 400mg a day. But I haven’t been to see my GP for the prescription as she is on holiday and I don’t like any of the other GP’s who work there. So I’ll just wait until Monday, I have enough meds to see me through til then as I got a week’s discharge pack when I left hospital. With some interesting notes on my discharge sheet such as:

I’m really not sure how I feel about the changing of my diagnosis. Well I know it hasn’t been changed officially yet but lets face it, of all the ‘mentals’ to get schizophrenia is down there at the bottom of the pile of the ones you would want. Not that you would want any. I apologise, it’s 5:44am and I’m babbling. OK, so they haven’t actually changed my diagnosis yet but it looks like it’s heading that way. There has been quite some time now where scary words like psychosis and delusional and anti-psychotics have all been a part of my vocabulary and it’s a bit frightening really.

But then, Bipolar was really frightening to start with at well. Don’t get me wrong, there was a degree of relief for the name for my weird behaviour. But then so was ‘depression and anxiety’ at one point. And ‘agoraphobia’ and admitted to being a ‘self harmer’. There is a lot of shame still surrounding mental health and I know there are all these campaigns to try and make that change but it’s almost like “oh she only has a little bit of anxiety, don’t worry she’ll be fine” to “oh my god have you heard about that my crazy bipolar life well they think she’s schizo as well”. Does that make sense or am I being stupid? Lots of people will experience an episode of feeling depressed or anxious in their life, but proper full on hardcore mental health is when we are going down the Bipolar and Schizophrenic roads. And now they think I could have both or one or whatever.

One part of my brain says ‘nonsense – I’m totally fine’ – another part of my brain says ‘I can’t handle one more moment of not knowing what is real and what is not. I don’t know whose talking to me half the time. I don’t know if they really exist. I don’t know why they watch me and I don’t know how they read my thoughts, but somehow, they do’.

The Patty voice of last year – the commanding and insulting one who made me do some pretty fucked up things, well she is well and truly gone. I have three people living inside me just now. Four if I include myself. These people are nameless but huge when it comes to personality. One has very distinctive pink hair, she is a large lady and regularly taunts me over my appearance. But I don’t get it, I see her in the mirror next to me and initially I think I look pretty good compared to her but somehow she talks me down, insults me, swears at me, does everything in her power to make me believe that every word she says is gospel.

The second female voice is the one who taunts me over my baby loss. When I think of her I think of leopard skin fur, I really don’t know why. She taunts me, tells me I deserved to lose him, makes scary things happen to him in my dreams and when I’m awake. I want to scream at her to leave us alone, I think there is a bit of Patty in her as she doesn’t speak that much directly to me, more in conversation with the others.

The last one I hear is a male voice which I find a bit disturbing. Well a lot disturbing really. He likes to talk about the abuse from my childhood and tell me that I enjoyed it. I know this type of voice is actually more common than I think. But fuck, it is scary. It turns me from a relatively sane adult into a crying mess curled up into the foetal position and terrified to let myself think in case it’s another thought like that. Dirty little slag that I am.

Living with people inside you and only having control over yourself is damn hard work. Except you have actually been controlled by these people that only you seem to be able to see for so long that you actually don’t have any control over yourself, you just think you do. You actually live by trying to shut them the fuck up. Overdosing for peace. Cutting to watch the bad poisonous blood inside me trickle out thick and fast and dark and know at least some of it has an outlet from my body.

It’s 6.07am and I don’t think the diazepam is working. The amisulpride doesn’t seem to have any sedative type effects whatsoever which is a shame really, even though I spent half my life feeling like a zombie, I quite liked that easier to sleep feeling that the Quetiapine/Seroquel gave me. Maybe once the amisulpride moves up a few notches it will calm my brain down slightly. Right now it’s causing me to lose sleep and that makes me like a bear with a sore head.

I hate this coming out of hospital thing, those initial days after it when you question if you did the right thing by leaving so abruptly and questioning if you really can cope with life in the outside world. I wanted to come out to be a help to my Mum not another burden and right now that’s exactly what my mind is telling me that I am.

Hmm well it’s 6.19am now and I am going to sit and watch morning news until the sun rises or I fall asleep.